Miami Neighborhoods · Liberty City
Miami built its first public housing here, then built a wall around it. Ninety years later the neighborhood is still arguing with the city about who gets to stay.
Liberty City is a Black neighborhood in northwest Miami, about two square miles, built around the oldest public housing in the American Southeast. It is where E5 Enclave was founded.
Most of what gets written about Liberty City is written from outside it — crime rankings, "areas to avoid" listicles, the occasional prestige film. This page is the other thing: what actually happened here, with sources, and what is happening now.
The land was Black-owned before it was developed. In 1908 four farming families — the Sampsons, Strothers, Perrys and Richardsons — pooled money to buy acreage in the area. When developer Floyd Davis platted the community in 1922 during the Florida land boom, he kept their names on the streets.[1]
That ownership was then actively devalued. Federal appraisers rated the area Hazardous — the redlining designation — citing "negro concentration," which cut residents off from the low-interest mortgages that built white Miami's wealth in the same decades.[1]
Liberty Square was built between 1934 and 1937 with New Deal Public Works Administration money and opened on 6 February 1937. It was designed by the Miami firm Paist and Steward and built for African American residents, to relieve overcrowding in segregated Overtown.[2]
It was the first public housing project in Florida and one of only thirteen PWA-sponsored housing projects in the country built for African American residents.[2] Miami-Dade County describes it as the oldest public housing project in the southeastern United States.[3] Residents have called it the Pork & Beans for generations.
When Liberty Square opened, white residents to the east objected. A concrete wall was built along NW 12th Avenue to separate the new Black housing from the white neighborhoods beside it. Sections of that wall are still standing.[4][5]
Published accounts of the wall disagree with each other. The year is given as 1936, as 1939, and as "the late 1930s." Its height is reported as four feet, five feet, seven feet and eight feet. Its length is given as running from NW 62nd to NW 67th Street, and as running to NW 71st.
The reason they disagree is that historians Dorothy Fields, founder of the Black Archives, and Timothy Barber have both stated that no official record of the wall's construction or partial demolition exists.[4][5] A structure built to divide a city by race was apparently never written down. We think that absence is worth stating plainly rather than papering over with a confident number. The wall was designated a historic site in 2006.[6]
On 7–8 August 1968, during the Republican National Convention across the bay in Miami Beach, unrest broke out in Liberty City. At least three people were killed. The Florida National Guard was deployed alongside 200 deputies and a dusk-to-dawn curfew was imposed.[7]
The larger event came twelve years later. Arthur McDuffie, a 33-year-old Black insurance agent and former Marine, was beaten by Dade County officers on 17 December 1979 and died on 21 December. The medical examiner found injuries inconsistent with the motorcycle crash the officers had staged, including a skull fracture roughly ten inches long. The trial was moved to Tampa, where an all-white, six-man jury acquitted four officers on all counts on 17 May 1980 after deliberating under three hours. The lead prosecutor was Janet Reno.[8][9]
The uprising that followed ran from 17 to 20 May 1980: eighteen people killed, roughly 370 injured, 787 arrested, and about $100 million in damage. Some 3,500 National Guard troops were deployed.[8][9] In November 1981 the county settled the McDuffie family's civil suit for $1.1 million; they had sought $25 million.[8]
Liberty Square is being rebuilt. Four phases of the Liberty Square Rising redevelopment, a partnership between Related Urban and Miami-Dade County, have delivered 790 homes to 793 families, including 245 "legacy" families who returned. Phases five and six broke ground in March 2026, adding 540 more units.[10]
How well the redevelopment kept its promise to residents is genuinely disputed. The developer reports 245 legacy families returned. Reporting by WLRN on the documentary Razing Liberty Square found that only five families stayed through the process, while hundreds took Section 8 vouchers and left.[11] The two figures may be measuring different things — staying in place versus returning afterward — but we are not going to publish one and hide the other.
The other pressure is elevation. Liberty City sits about twelve feet above sea level, high ground in a metro area where most land is not.[11] A 2018 study in Environmental Research Letters found that elevation positively affected price appreciation in 24 of 25 Miami-Dade jurisdictions.[12] The study does not name Liberty City; the connection to this neighborhood is one journalists and residents have drawn, and it is the reason "climate gentrification" is a phrase people here use.
Along the historic NW 15th Avenue commercial corridor, storefront vacancy is high, which the 2026 Dade Heritage Trust survey attributes in part to the redevelopment itself.[1]
The Historic Hampton House, at 4200 NW 27th Avenue, is often described as being in Liberty City. It is in neighbouring Brownsville. It is worth the trip either way — we have written about it there.
Barry Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McCraney both grew up in Liberty City. Moonlight, set here, won Best Picture in 2017; a street was renamed Moonlight Way.[13] Also from the neighborhood: Luther Campbell, who runs the Liberty City Optimist Club; Trina; Trick Daddy; Udonis Haslem; Barrington Irving, the first African American to fly solo around the world; Chad Johnson; and Willis McGahee.[3] M. Athalie Range, the first Black Miami city commissioner, came from Liberty City.
Liberty City has roughly 20,000 residents. We are not going to be more precise than that, and neither should anyone else. Because the neighborhood has no official boundary, published population and racial-composition figures are drawn over different census tracts and contradict each other badly — one widely cited source reports the area as 94.7% Black, another as 39.9%. Those cannot both describe the same place. Current poverty, unemployment and crime figures for Liberty City specifically come almost entirely from commercial data aggregators, and we do not consider those reliable enough to republish.
E5 Enclave is a lineage-led think tank and 501(c)(3) nonprofit, founded in Liberty City on 2 June 2024.
Our missionProgramsJoin the coalitionPublished by E5 Enclave Incorporated. Corrections: [email protected]